Book Review - FEAR: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists

Tyler West reviews Byron Clark's "FEAR", from the third edition of The Commonweal published in May 2023.

In recent years a rigorous debate has taken place in New Zealand’s media and civil society about how to analyse and respond to the increasingly vocal subculture of conspiracy theorising and its close connections to the radical right. With FEAR: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists author Byron Clark makes a valuable contribution to that debate with a wide-ranging investigation into the interrelation of those two worlds. FEAR lands shortly after Dylan Reeve’s Fake Believe: Conspiracy Theories in Aotearoa (Upstart Press 2022) and simultaneously with Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand (Otago University Press 2023) edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij, and Paul Spoonley coming a month after. Along with a great deal of journalistic investigation and several documentaries on the matter, clearly great interest has been aroused among the reading public.

Though the chapters are broken by subject, the book nevertheless presents a compelling narrative. It follows events from the minor furore over the planned Molyneux/Southern speaking event in Auckland in 2018, through the 2019 terror attacks, and into the feverish pandemic politics of the 2020s. We’re carried along as paranoid rants to a small audience and sparsely attended protests build to a serious movement online and off, leaving us to wonder what could be done to start bringing people back down to Earth (with a few suggestions from Clark himself on where to start). Clark takes us on a whirlwind tour of organisations, introducing readers to a constellation of groups on the radical right and the conspiratorial fringes, from fascist cells to small electoral parties to dedicated conspiracy peddlers. The more thematic chapters cover a broad variety of topics. One takes us to speculative fiction on the radical right, another explores Rhodesian nostalgia in New Zealand, a third and fourth look at the strange worlds of sovereign citizenship and Qanon.

I have some criticisms of this book, but they’re as much about what could have been covered as what’s in the book itself. Something that is in the book, and has sparked a debate between some academics and journalists, is a chapter on Hindutva (Hindu nationalism). Some have noted a lack of evidence for the presence of an organised Hindutva movement in New Zealand, while others focus on the close relationship between the Hindu Council of New Zealand and the international Hindutva organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad. I fall somewhere in the middle: while the evidence for an organised movement in New Zealand is relatively thin, it is of concern that a prominent cultural organisation maintains a close working relationship with an organisation so enmeshed in ethnic and religious nationalism.

Much of my critique, however, is about what’s absent. Some figures, one notoriously litigious fascist writer stands out, never warrant a mention despite remaining active today and working with some of the organisations in the book. Similarly, some of the prominent conspiracies that tie the modern conspiracy movement to some of their earlier iterations feel notably absent. I, at least, would have liked a chapter on historical revisionism in New Zealand such as those about pre-Māori civilisations, and one which discussed earlier examples of kinds of conspiracy theorising prominent today. False flag and ‘planned disaster’ theories, like the ones which suggest the 2010 & 2011 Christchurch Earthquakes were artificially generated, long predate those which have sprouted like noxious weeds around the 2019 terror attacks.

As it stands, however, Clark’s book is a fantastic introduction to a world relatively few had acknowledged until recent years. For those only passingly familiar with the topic and looking to get a handle on it, FEAR is an excellent and readable primer. For those who have been following matters a little more closely it is still a useful drawing together of the disparate groups and figures into a single study. Even with some criticisms, I still heartily recommend this book for those entirely unfamiliar and those all too familiar with the subject.